Stalking Silver

January 12, 2001

https://www.smartertimes.com/298/stalking-silver

The front-page article in today's New York Times about the effect of a court ruling on school funding reports, "The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, was traveling in Israel yesterday and could not be reached for comment."

The Times article might as well have said, "We couldn't be bothered to reach one of the key sources for this story and used the fact that he was out of the country as an excuse for not getting him on the phone. What's more, our three-person Jerusalem bureau didn't make it a priority to help us track him down."

Why is Smartertimes.com being so uncharacteristically harsh? Well, because it's clear from elsewhere in this morning's New York Times that, even though he was in Israel, Mr. Silver in fact could be reached for comment. In fact, page B9 of the metro section of today's Times features an obituary of Rabbi Yitzchok Singer. The obituary contains a quote about the rabbi with the attribution, "said Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York State Assembly, in a telephone interview from Tel Aviv yesterday."

Chao, McConnell, and Beck: The front-page New York Times story today on the selection of Elaine Chao to serve as secretary of labor in the Bush administration reports that Ms. Chao is the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell, "the conservative senator from Kentucky who has led the opposition to campaign finance reform. One Republican objection to the reform bills is that they do not block unions from contributing; Ms. Chao would now be the administration's chief official dealing with those unions."

This is an imprecise attempt to manufacture a conflict of interest. Senator McConnell would never have called for blocking unions from making political contributions; as the Senate's leading defender of the First Amendment, he understands, unlike the Times, that that would be contrary to the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. The Times describes this issue as a "Republican objection" to the "reform" bills, but it seems like a stretch to hold Ms. Chao or Senator McConnell responsible for every stupid thought ever uttered by a Republican. What some Republicans want to do is enforce the Supreme Court's Beck decision, which says that union members have the right to demand and receive a refund of the portion of their dues used for political activity. That's a far cry from blocking unions from contributing. It simply allows individual union members to opt out.

The Big City: The New York Times' "Big City" column is often a bright spot that challenges the big-government orthodoxy at the Times. But it is a sign of how powerful the group-think is at the newspaper that even that column today hews to the liberal orthodoxy when it comes to the court ruling on school funding. The column makes some motions of independence, challenging the notion that higher spending correlates with higher student achievement and the notion that judges should make these policy decisions. But the column seems to endorse wholeheartedly the idea of "redistributing wealth" and "redressing the financial inequities among school districts." This is the typical Marxist-New York Times opposition to "inequities," a preference to equality over freedom. Smartertimes.com doesn't see what's wrong with inequity. As long as every school district has the minimum funding necessary to provide students with an adequate education, why should districts that want to spend more be prevented from doing so in the name of "redistributing wealth"?

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